Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person but a whole climate of opinion […] under whom we conduct our different lives:The above quotation stems from W. H. Auden's poem 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud', written at the time of Freud's death, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War (Auden, 1945, p. 163).It introduces the third chapter in Jennifer Spitzer's book, The Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis, in which the author outlines the complex relationships of rivalry, mutual admiration, covert and overt borrowing and the struggle for independence between literature and psychoanalysis in the modernist period.As the quotation suggests, in the cultural realm Spitzer analyses (her focus is primarily on the Anglo-American region), psychoanalysis appeared to be everywhere.In the USA, psychoanalytic ideas were employed by progressive thinkers 'as a liberatory discourse that challenged American sexual puritanism' (p.12).In the UK, especially following the publication of Freud's translated works in Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, writers and artists in literary London did not always agree with Freud, 'but he was always taken with the utmost seriousness' (p.12).It is this intricate engagement with psychoanalysis as something thatno matter what they thought of itwriters had no way of avoiding that Spitzer successfully illustrates by concentrating on four literary figures: D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov.Modernist authors were famously vexed by the problem of the writer's relationship to the literary market and to the masses.Related to this was literature's relationship with the natural sciencesmedicine and psychology, in particularwhich writers like D.H. Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield feared would rob the literary work of its 'soul', reducing its mystery to the schematic explanation of the case study.Indeed, the fact that the Psycho-analytical Librarypublished by the Hogarth Presswas also the press's most profitable project that helped to subsidise the publication of some of Woolf's novels says a lot about the interdependency of these two fields, as well as about their position within the prevailing socio-economic structures.While both literary authors and psychoanalysts were concerned with questions of perception, ANA TOMCIC is a cultural historian working at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, UK.She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the project 'Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for our Times'.Her interests include modernist literature and the history of psychoanalysis, particularly its intersections with questions of class, education, gender and ethnicity.
Source: Psychoanalysis and History
Author: Ana Tomcic
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4394724824